Christmas Cactus Star

If last week’s finish of my Kaffe Fassett Blue Moon Quilt was my “Oh Wow” finish for October, the two quilts made this week will be my “ooooh” finishes, thanks to the MMMaster MMManipulator, Sandra, mmmquilts. When I was at the GP House several weeks ago, she sent me a photo first, then a pattern after I mentioned that she didn’t send it to me, of her upcoming pattern release Lilac Love, a beautiful quilt which was featured in the July/August 2019 issue of McCalls Quilting, but with an updated version. Being one of her mmmany mmminions, I made a wall hanging and then a baby size version. Christmas Cactus Star is the wall hanging version which was the first one made and not quite surprisingly, I didn’t follow the star pattern, for reasons I’ll explain.

When I first saw the Lilac Love pattern and possibly influenced by the name, I was thinking of using purple fabric but nothing in my stash sang out to me. I did happen to purchase while on our Yosemite vacation in September, a charm pack and yardage of Lori Holt’s Hometown Holiday fabric line and thought I could use this for Lilac Love. I wanted to use the lovely red floral print for the rectangles surrounding the Star and thought to emphasize it, I would make it with more green fabrics and accents of red and that's how I thought of Christmas Cactus Star. It took me some time to finally figure out how I was going to make the star and that I needed to purchase additional green fabrics from this collection and from the Calico and Autumn collection. I was only expected to make a cushion but I rather make a wall hanging,

The Star in the Lilac Love pattern looks three dimensional but I opted for a two dimensional look and for the angle challenge quilter  that I am, it took me three tries to get the star right. The first photo on the left, I thought only the red points in the fifth row were pointing wrong and once it was ripped out and resewn, I realized the green points in the sixth row was also pointing wrong so again the seam ripper was used, rip-it, rip-it. I think it’s ironic that the middle star looks like a frog star. Because of this, there was a possibility that I was going to rename the quilt Sailor Star because of all the salty language I used when realizing my mistakes. Thankfully the darling Granddaughter wasn’t around.

I had no problem sewing the corner stars and I used a yellow square from the charm pack which was just enough for the center. I think I may have finally learned my lesson to not deviate from Sandra’s patterns.

I added a 2.5” strip for the border to make this a 28” wallhanging. I machine quilted with white Aurifil thread with quadrant straight lines which is one of my favorite ways when a small quilt with a star in the center. It’s very easy and fast with just quilting an “X” in the center and then using that as a guide to quilt 1” apart. The binding is a plaid print from the Autumn fabric line.

I just love my Christmas Cactus Star Quilt and am looking forward to hanging it up in December. The Master Quilt Holder was not needed to hold up Christmas Cactus Star Quilt thanks to the nifty green wire hanger with the red mini clothes pins hanging from the flag pole bracket. He seems to be taking lessons from Texas Quilt Gal’s Hubby of wearing coordinating clothes when presenting a quilt. He will be needed to hold up the second quilt which is almost 40” square made with the Lilac Love pattern but will be behind the scenes because I'm pretty sure he doesn’t own a pair of shoes in Citronickle. I will post this very lovely and fun quilt when Sandra releases the pattern hopefully later this week. I will say with the second quilt I did follow Sandra’s pattern; it looks more complicated but was way faster to sew and lives up to her style of making complicated quilts sew easy. Now with these two quilts, I can resume machine quilting the Halloween quilt which is needed sooner than later.